When I see a Virginia team struggling like we’re seeing right now, and it isn’t often that we see that, I think back to a conversation that I had 10 years ago with Anthony Gill, back when the media folks at UVA Athletics still let us get to know the guys decently well.
Yeah, it’s been a while.
This conversation was at the 2014 ACC Tournament.
Gill was a redshirt sophomore in his first year on the court at Virginia after transferring from South Carolina, and having to sit out the transfer year.
Remember when they used to have to do that?
Toward the end of the 2012-2013 season, Joe Harris had just been named first-team All-ACC, and I remember a small media gathering asking him about the honor after it had been announced, trying to get quotes to flesh out our stories.
And I remember Joe saying something to the effect of, It’s a great honor, but I’m not even the best player on the team; watch out for Anthony Gill next year.
With that as our teaser, Gill, in his first year, struggled coming out of the gate – had a goose egg in an early loss to VCU, another goose egg in a December win over Northern Iowa, a string of seven straight single-digit games in ACC play in January and into early February, culminating in a one-point afternoon in a win over Pitt on Super Bowl Sunday.
And then, just like that, Gill was the guy that Harris had told us about, averaging double-digits in his final 15 games that season as Virginia went on to a 16-2 finish in the ACC, won the ACC Tournament, earned a #1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, and advanced to the Sweet Sixteen.
I asked Gill after one of the ACCT games what had happened that sort of set him off in the right direction back in early February.
“Coach Bennett has been trusting me, he’s trusted me from Day 1, but on defense, I was a liability at the beginning of the year because I didn’t understand the Pack Line like he wanted me to,” Gill said. “I’ve been working at it, and I’ve been really trying to understand it more and put more effort into understanding it, and my offense has been put on the back burner so that I could play defense. That’s what I wanted to do, because I know that in order for us to win, I would have to be able to play defense.”
Gill was part of a team in 2013-2014 that was a mix of veteran guys – Harris and Akil Mitchell were seniors – and a bunch of young guys – Malcolm Brogdon was a redshirt sophomore, Justin Anderson, Mike Tobey and Evan Nolte were second-year sophomores, London Perrantes was a freshman.
This year’s Virginia team has a similar mix.
Reece Beekman is a four-year starter, and Jake Groves is a grad student and fifth-year college player, though a first-year guy at Virginia, after transferring in from Oklahoma.
The only other guy who played significant minutes at Virginia last year was Isaac McKneely, who averaged 21.5 minutes per game off the bench.
Ryan Dunn, getting lottery-pick buzz, played sparingly (12.9 minutes per game) a year ago.
Taine Murray, a junior, on the fringe of the rotation of late, averaged 7.5 minutes per game his first two seasons, with a ton of DNPs.
The rest of the rotation guys – sophomore transfer guard Andrew Rohde, redshirt freshman Leon Bond III, and freshmen Blake Buchanan and Elijah Gertrude – are still new, which means, they’re 14 games into playing the Pack Line, and into running Bennett’s version of the motion offense, which blends mover-blocker and middle-third triangle sets.
The talent is there, as it was a decade ago – that 2013-2014 team would have Brogdon and Harris go on to be $20 million-a-year NBA guys, Gill is making a living in the Association with the Washington Wizards, and Anderson was a first-round draft pick in 2015.
It took not only Gill, but the other guys on that breakthrough Bennett-era team, a while to learn how to play the way Tony Bennett wanted them to play.
That team’s 15-game record was 11-4; with the losses at home to VCU and Wisconsin, scoring 38 in the latter, a loss at Green Bay, the beatdown by 35 at Tennessee.
I don’t bring that up to try to suggest that this year’s team is obviously just going to start getting it, like that team did, and win 30 games, like that team did.
Just that, it’s young, and talented, and that a young and talented team coached by Tony Bennett needs some time to figure things out.
“We talked about after the game, when you’re playing well, it’s easy, and your highs can be as high as you want, but a step for us as a team and everything is, when we’re struggling a little bit, you can’t let your lows just be so low, you just figure out ways to kind of stop the bleeding, maybe not the big runs,” Bennett said after Saturday’s 76-60 loss at North Carolina State, the second double-digit ACC loss for the ‘Hoos in two weeks.
“That’s, you know, again, our inexperience certainly does show, and this is not a year in this league to be inexperienced,” Bennett said. “There’s good veteran teams, and you got to be ready, but we’ll keep working at it.”
I’m putting this to pen and paper because I’m trying to counsel my fellow UVA hoops fans into – patience.
Of the 10 guys who got minutes for Bennett yesterday in Raleigh, two – Beekman and McKneely – were regular rotation guys a year ago, and a third, Dunn, only started getting rotation minutes down the stretch last season.
Doing the math, that’s two and a half guys who know what they’re doing, and seven and a half guys who are still figuring things out.
This is not to excuse the four double-digit losses, all away from the cozy environs of JPJ.
At home, Virginia can look like a Top 25 team, with a double-digit win over a ranked Texas A&M and two 20-point-plus conference Ws on the ledger to date.
“When you’re inexperienced, the energy of the crowd can help you,” Bennett conceded, “but you know, good teams, the times we’ve gotten into situations, we’ve gotten down, I think we sometimes get discouraged, and then it unravels quickly, if we’re missing shots, and then when our defense gives up some easy buckets, it gets tough.”
That’s what happened on Saturday.
Virginia had been getting out to slow starts on the road – down 13-1 at Memphis, down 13-0 at Notre Dame.
The Cavaliers led State 19-15 at the first half under-8 media timeout on Saturday, and then things snowballed.
The Pack closed the half on a 20-9 run to take a seven-point lead into the break, and outscored Virginia 27-13 in the opening 10 minutes of the second half to put the game away.
In that stretch, the Pack was 20-of-30 from the field, a bonkers number over that long a stretch against a team that had come into the game ranked in the Top 10 nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency.
The slumped shoulders that we saw after some of the makes were read by some of the fans as evidence of guys sorta, kinda giving up.
Bennett doesn’t bristle much publicly, but he did at a question in his postgame presser hitting on that point.
“As far as competitive fire, I mean, that’s easy, you know, to sit there and say that,” Bennett said. “We got outplayed. We made some some errors, you know, running out too far in trapping, and then it got in there, and we got a little, which happened against Memphis and some of the other ones, when we got down, we got a little rattled and tried to get it back too quick, and I think that composure, inexperience at times, is what all of a sudden separates it, and then a bad decision on the offensive end can lead to you know, indecision on the defensive end.
“I think it’s as much that than saying, well, you lacked the competitive fire, and I don’t think it’s quite like that. But you got to fight like crazy. I know that. Been in this long enough,” Bennett said.
Virginia Basketball fans are a fickle lot. I’ve got one in-house here at AFP doubling down on how it seems to him that the game, the way it’s played today, with no-fault transfers and NIL, is passing Bennett by, and that this year may be the end of the Bennett era at UVA, just because he won’t want to continue to be a part of what college basketball has become.
I don’t sense that out of him or out of the 2023-2024 team.
“These are good young men that I think, they lay it on the line, but there’s times that, those who’ve been through the battles know, you just you die and you fight it as hard as you can,” Bennett said. “I think we’re learning, and we’re still trying to find the right personnel. I shortened that rotation early, and then, you know, tried some other guys here and there, but you just keep challenging them.”
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Chris Graham
